AESTHETICIZING VIOLENCE,

OR HOW TO DO THINGS WITH STYLE

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Margaret Ervin Bruder
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Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of Comparative Literature,
Indiana University
June 2003

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 UMI Number: 3111844

Copyright 2003 by
Bruder, Margaret Ervin

All rights reserved.

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 Accepted b y the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

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Christopher Anderson, Ph.D.
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Joan Hawkins

Doctoral Committee

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Barbara Klinger

June 10, 2003

/Ik
Jam es Naremore

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c 2003
Margaret Ervin Bruder
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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 M argaret Ervin Bruder

Aestheticizing Violence,
Or H ow to Do Things with Style

Over the course of the last decade, politicians and cultural critics have been increasingly vehement

in their condemnation of media violence. Particularly in response to the rash of high school

violence that erupted throughout the 1990s, policy makers and m edia watchdogs have played to a

general fear that representations of violence in America's popular culture encourage violent

behavior. Yet despite political and social pressure, H ollyw ood continues to produce a large

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number of extremely brutal films that aestheticize their violent moments. This dissertation builds

from the assumption that the popular media reflects the dialog a culture holds with itself and
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suggests that the prevalence of such images reveals something about American culture more

generally. By approaching a selection of recent H ollyw ood films from a number of different
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theoretical avenues (genre, authorship, star image) and by querying them from within a variety of

contexts (globalism, feminism, race), this study challenges the critical entrenchment of the media
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effects tradition in the discussion of cinematic violence. Instead of merely acting as a bad influence

on our youth, H ollyw ood's violent style overturns the classic H ollyw ood subordination of formal

elements to narrative concerns, inviting audiences to explore new m odes of reading and meaning-

making appropriate for a culture increasingly reflecting and being reflected by digital

technologies. In this, aestheticized violence performs the cultural function of helping us to

negotiate a change in technological and aesthetic paradigms.

IV

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 T able of C ontents

C h ap ter 1: A Violent O pening 1

C h ap ter 2: Technologies of M ayhem, O r W hy This Violence, Why N ow ? 37

Chapter 3: You Scream, I Scream: Hybrid Horrors and Serial Logic 76

C h ap ter 4: Violence Travels: Jean-Claude Van Damm e's Mobile Image 112

Chapter 5: Grisham v. Stone: The Act of Authorship in

the A ge of Digital Reproduction 151

Chapter 6: "How Sexy Am I Now?: Stylish W omen and Their Violence 183

Chapter 7: Not Just a Black Thang: Films on Drugs 218

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Conclusion IE 250

Works Cited 256

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 A V io len t Opening

During the spectacularly stylized and particularly gory Omaha Beach landing sequence at the
beginning o f Stephen Spielberg's 1998 Saving Private Ryan, an American soldier, missing one
o f his arms, drifts into the frame. Oblivious to the bullets flying around him, he searches through
the bodies littering the beach until he finds the disconnected limb. Picking it up, he wanders
aimlessly away.

I begin w ith this particularly gruesom e m om ent from perhaps the m ost violent film

opening ever, (Village Voice review er, A m y Taubin credits Saving Private Ryan w ith having

"more gore and a higher body count than any m ovie ever made" (113)) because it has so m uch to

say to us, not about the violence of World War II, or the violence of war in general, but rather

ab o u t representations of violence an d o u r am bivalence tow ards them . T hat the soldier is literally

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disarmed by the violence around him serves as analogy for our most basic fear about w h a t film

violence can do to its spectator. To be "disarmed" invokes not only the sense of being deprived of
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a means of physical defense —for exam ple, of having one's weapon or one's armor taken a w a y —it

also carries the connotation of being deprived of a figurative defense. When w e are disarmed in
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this secondary sense, it is through a flanking m ove —lulled out of our suspicions, charmed into

vulnerability, w e are attacked from the side. The belief that violent images can disarm —that is,

charm and fascinate —drives the majority of recent studies of media violence, which suggests that
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through the singular agency of the violent im age the spectator is som ehow opened to a

suggestion he w’ould not ordinarily entertain. Sim ply by looking at screen im ages of violated

bodies, the integrity of the spectating subject is also compromised; the resulting being becomes

little more than a zombie.

Those w ho fear that violent images can seduce and disarm individuals frequently also

entertain the more general concern that they w ill also disarm the culture, wresting from it the

values it requires to remain intact. As evangelist Phil Phillips and conservative moralist joan

Hake Robie put it, "...media violence encourages behaviors that threaten a civilized society" (237).

Because youth are constantly exposed to violent representations, they have becom e "barbarians

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 w ho...associate violence w ith pleasure," says W est Point psycholog}.' professor, Lt. Col. David

G rossm an. T hey are so desensitized that they can w atch "bloody violence" in m ovie theaters and

y et keep on "eating popcorn an d drinking pop" (36). This should not surprise us, pastor D avid T.

Moore claims, because "ft]his generation cut their (sic) teeth on C.I. Joe cartoons (eighty' acts of

violence per hour), g raduated to Terminator, and finished off their (sic) violent indoctrination

w ith Texas Chainsazu Massacre. Such an escalation of violence is no t harm less. It has h ad a grisly

effect on o u r culture" (290).

The dire predictions and condem nations of m edia critics often display a rem arkable

degree of verbal aggression against the consum ers of m edia violence —the very g ro u p they claim

to w a n t to protect —an d view these consum ers from a perspective of violent m oral repugnance.

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This tendency to see violence in moral terms was noted over a century and a half ago by Thomas

De Quincey in his essay, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." Despite De Quincey's
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outrageous attempt to provide an alternative to the K antian link between the beautiful and the

good, what he refers to as the "moral handle" remains so ingrained in our perception that critics
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from Sissela Bok to Stephen Prince have difficulty relating to violent representations in any other

than moral terms. The increasing dependence in recent years on "effects" research, which view s

media violence in terms of its supposed direct effect on viewers, has merely exacerbated this
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tendency. This trend has developed to such an extent that when Karen Cerulo published

Deciphering Violence in 1998, her method of "deciphering" consisted of looking at how w e judge

whether violent representations are moral or immoral, justifiable or unjustifiable.

Mirroring this tendency to view violence and its representations in the media from the

"moral handle," the current debate about film violence in particular tends to separate a good, or

meaningful, violence from a meaningless, or bad, one. Determinations of good and bad violence

are most often based on a style/con tent dichotomy. Devin McKinney's theory', which separates

weak from strong violence, is probably the best exam ple of the tendency to vilify a more formal

type of violence while celebrating a thematically or narratively oriented kind. H e claims, for

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 exam ple, th a t the "kitchen sink style" of Henri/: Portrait of a Serial Killer produces a strong form of

violence in that the style serves a narrative that asks us consider both the banality and tire

consequences of violent action (19). The "brilliant" style of a film like State of Grace, on the other

hand, is weak, even an "affront," because it is "severed cleanly from the film's involving fiction"

(20). As McKinney argues, weak violence is "too articulate... in the limited sense of 'nice'

cinematic effects too w ell contrived to have any other content" (19). Strong violence, in contrast,

"communicates the sense that a person who in one moment is fully alive has been reduced to

God's garbage" (17). Although in Fugitive Cultures, Henry A. Giroux describes three kinds of

violence (ritualistic, symbolic and hyper-real), his discussion of the relative merits of a number of

violent films ultimately takes the same form as McKinney's. On the one hand, he condemns films

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that "depend on pure spectacle" (61) and "technological overstimulation" (64); on the other, he

celebrates a film violence of a more "symbolic" nature, one in which violence is "used to probe the
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depths of everyday life in ways that expand one's understanding of tyranny and domination"

(59). In films like Unforgiven, The Crying Game, and Schindler's List, Giroux and McKinney note a
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kind of represented violence that allows us to question the very nature of social violence.

According to Giroux, this kind of film violence "probes the com plex contradictions that shape

human agency, the limits of rationality, and the existential issues that ties us to other human
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beings and a broader social world" (63). The violence portrayed in films like True Lies and Die

Hard with A Vengeance, on the other hand, "m axim ize[s] the sleazy side of pleasure, reinforce[s]

demeaning stereotypes and provokefs] cheap voyeurism" (59).

In traditional critical terms, if it is to merit social justification, violence representations

have been asked to replicate what critics R. L. Rutsky and Justin W yatt refer to as "serious

pleasures" or "the pleasures of rational critique"(3), which m ust be deep enough so that

"empathies are...engaged, commitments are...brought to bear, ambivalences

are...acknowledged" (McKinney 21). The critical success of a film like Saving Private Ryan lies

primarily in its appeal to these rational kinds of pleasures based in language, narrative and

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 character development. Yet this stands in contrast to another form of appeal in the film, one

R utsky and W yatt discuss in terms of "non-serious pleasure11or "fun." This m ode of viewing

"cannot be figured in term s of depth" because it "slides over the surface of a text like a passing

glance, nev er staying fixed for long, never 'anchoring' itself in the depths of meaning, character

identification or imagistic fascination" (11). The O m aha Beach landing sequence opens by

show ing us characters for whom w e have, as yet, no narrative context, then proceeds to do just

about everything technically possible to keep us from being able to focus our attention on

individuals or specific actions, all the while giving us images which Janet Maslin described by

asking us to "imagine Hieronymus Bosch with a Steadicam." A film violence that lends itself to

such a decontextualized, non-serious mode of view ing is seductive in the sam e way that

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Friedrich Nietzsche found the "decadent" art of Wagner's Operas to be, calling us towards "style"

and away from "truth." Our discomfort with the attractiveness of style, particularly that aspect of
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it which can lead us to forget content, is one basis for our anxiety in accepting violence, as De

Quincey bids us to do, on "purely" aesthetic grounds. Yet as N ietzsche also notes, such an
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attention to surfaces is not without its ow n rewards. In the fourth preface to The Gay Science w e

are indeed encouraged "to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore

appearance, to believe in tones, words, in the w hole Olym pus of appearance"(38).

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This line of argument suggests that, contrary to Giroux's position, "a violence...that is

pure spectacle in form and superficial in content" might very w ell be "edifying in the best

pedagogical sense" (Giroux 61). Particularly in those instances in which violence is

"aestheticized," where stylistic presentation exceeds the narrative econom y to such a degree as to

become disruptive, w e find an opening for thinking about how style might "do things" on its

own. Just as De Quincey's consideration of an "aesthetically pleasing" m u rd er leads him to

question the moral and philosophical truths of Victorian England, our reading H ollyw ood's

current "aestheticized" film violence allows us to reconsider h ow w e have traditionally thought

a b o u t film style and representations of violence. In his essay, "The Third Meaning," Roland

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 Barthes claims th at along with the obvious m eaning of an im age (the signification via story) there

exists an obtuse m eaning, "discontinuous, indifferent to story and to the obvious m eaning" (61).

Like the obtuse m eaning, the aestheticized violence I w ill be discussing in this dissertation is "tire

epitom e of a counter-narrative" (63), producing a level of m eaning that "structures the film

differently w ith ou t.. .subverting the story" (64). Appealing to a different logic, it is a direct affront

to our typical w ays of reading, always showing their limitations: like the obtuse meaning, what

aestheticized violence "disturbs, sterilizes, is m etalanguage (criticism)" (326). In this, it also

resembles what W. J. T. Mitchell, in Picture Theory, calls the "metapicture," a self-referential

image aimed at show ing "what a picture is" (35) or at "picturing] theory" (57). He writes:

The metapicture is not a subgenre within the fine arts but a fundamental potentiality
inherent in pictorial representation as such; it is the place where pictures reveal and

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"know" them selves, where they reflect on the intersections of visuality, language, and
similitude, where they engage in speculation and theorizing on their own nature and
history. (82) IE
I want to suggest that films presenting an aestheticized form of violence serve as a form of

metapicture in the current H ollyw ood cinema, a location where contemporary representation
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reveals itself and its concerns. In the ways in which it calls attention to the cinematic techniques

used to create it and disrupts the traditional privileging of narrative over style, aestheticized

violence provides what Jacques Derrida refers to as "a violent opening" (Of Grammatology 140),
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a starting place for a discussion of violence representations that allows and even encourages

them to be disarming.

The Aesthetics o f V iolen ce

In the aftermath of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on

April 20,1999, the media and much of the country searched for solutions to deal with an

American "culture of violence." Predictably, the m edia looked to the entertainment industry to

provide an explanation. Within a few days commentators were speculating on the popular

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 cultural tastes of the two teenage killers, and had already m ade links to that old standby, Natural

Born Killers, (w hich according to Steve Levy of N ew sw eek, w as "rabidly view ed by the

C olum bine killers"(39)) as well as a new entry in the media violence debate, The Matrix, which

had been released just a few weeks earlier. By M ay, even President Bill Clinton, despite his many

financial ties to the entertainment industry, entered into the fray. Speaking at a fundraiser hosted

by none other than Steven Spielberg, Clinton adm onished the m ovie industry for not doing more

to curb the amount of violent content. A few' weeks later, he rode roughshod over tw o House

votes defeating bills designed to regulate the entertainment industry, calling instead for the

Federal Trade Commission to review whether the entertainment industry, like the cigarette

industry, w as intentionally marketing its adult products to children. Though the report released

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in the fall of 2000 found that H ollywood w as advertising movies for mature audiences to

children, hidden in an appendix was the adm ission that media violence has little effect on the
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youthful violent behavior. In January' of 2001, the Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher reported

that "media violence plays a very small factor in real violence" (Hatch 2). Nevertheless, the kind
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of critique that focuses on determining "good" and "bad" kinds of violence had created an

environment after Littleton, in which visually exuberant films like The M atrix could be held up as

bad "influences," w hile other violent films like Saving Private Ryan were never even under
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suspicion. Yet to som e extent, both of them m ight be said to stylize their violent mom ents and

both can be read, using Giroux's terms, as exploring themes of tyranny and domination. Why did

one film become an instant classic and the other an indication of the decadence of the popular

culture? The answer, I believe, is a question of style.

While almost all the review's of Saving Private Ryan mentioned the violence of the landing

sequence as a potential problem, the vast majority of critics and moviegoers ultimately found

little in it, or in the rest of the film for that matter, to take up arms against. According to som e

sources, Saving Private Ryan barely missed the dreaded NC-17 rating, and only the director's

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 considerable clout convinced the MPA A to settle for the more box-office-friendly R. Yet, w hen

The C hristian Science Monitor sent reporters to Boston area theaters to question emerging

moviegoers about the film's violence, no one interview ed stated that the film was "too" violent.

They ten d ed , like Spielberg himself, to justify the amount of violence w ith appeals to the

importance o f the subject matter and the need to present it realistically (Parney). As Spielberg put

it to CN N 's Paul Vercammen, "’Omaha Beach was actually an X setting. Even w orse than ’NC-17,

and I just kind of feel that (I had) to tell the truth about this war at the end of the century, 54 years

later. I wasn't going to add my film to a long list of pictures that make W orld War II 'the

glamorous war,' 'the romantic war.'"

By m ost accounts this is exactly what he accomplished. Shortly after the release of the

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film, newspapers were filled with stories of veterans w ho went to the film and swore to its

realism. Radio show s even supplied information about how vets re-traumatized by the film could
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find counseling. Editorials, film reviews and web pages were filled with testimonials about how

the film was bringing families, and indeed generations, together (Dauster). Judge Dennis
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Challeen of Winona, Minnesota, was so convinced that the film could instill the proper respect

for one's elders that he sentenced a teenager w ho had defaced the town's World War II Memorial

to watch it as part of his punishm ent ("Private"). In the process, and like Schindler's List before it,
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Saving Private Ryan became something more than just a movie. Both films were credited with

reawakening us to our national heritage, with bringing the past into our present. Because of

Schindler’s List, as Terrence Rafferty wrote in the N ew York Times, " the Holocaust, 50 years

removed from our contemporary consciousness, suddenly becomes overwhelm ingly immediate,

undeniable" (qtd. in Gourevitch 52). Similarly, Saving Private Ryan reinstated the WWII Soldier in

our cultural consciousness, establishing this abstraction from the past as one of People

magazine's 25 "Most Intriguing People of 1998."

In a rare move, Nick Gillespie noted the irony in all this: "Given that the Vietnam War

had been one of the major sources of generational friction, it is particularly ironic that the movie,

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 Saving Private Ryan has been a prime factor in narrow ing the generation gap." This fusion of

m ovie and historical experience reappears throughout the discourse surrounding the film. In an

interview w ith Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Spielberg underlined the sim ilarities

between real war and movies: "You've got an your overall objective. To achieve it, you go

through an impossible journey and you deploy a crew the way you deploy troops.... In a war

there's the enemy. In making a movie, nature and human nature are the enem ies—you know , bad

w eath er, actors going through bad divorces." As if to prove that filmmaking is war, tire official

web site gives ju st as much space to the care taken to collect and faithfully reproduce settings,

uniforms and equipment as it does to the catalog of m ovie credentials of those involved in the

production of the images. The majority of the web site, as well as much of the prerelease press, is

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devoted to recounting the cast's grueling ten-day stint bonding and learning how to be soldiers in

Captain Dale Dye's "boot camp." Dye's company, Warrior's Inc., is in the business of making
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"soldiers" out of ordinary m ovie stars. Meanwhile, the real soldiers, the 750 extras "recruited"

from the Irish army for the Omaha Beach landing sequence, gained credibility by also being
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"movie veterans, having worked in Mel Gibson's Braveheart." Even noted military historians

Stephen Ambrose and Paul Fussell added to the confusion between m ovie and historical

authenticity. Fussell, for example, suggested that the landing sequence m ight be made into a
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documentary entitled "Omaha Beach: Aren't You Glad You Weren't There" (Cohen 56). Ambrose

w ent even further, claiming that "One hundred years from now w hen people want to see what

the war was like, this film is where they'll look" (Butler).

With all the hype it w as easy to forget that the people making this film, as w ell as the vast

majority of those w ho managed to watch it again and again (perhaps the brothers of the girls

w h o watched Titanic over and over again the summer before), are lucky enough to have had no

personal experience of war. And, despite all these claims about the "documentary" look of the

Omaha beach landing sequence, the violence depicted is extremely stylized. N ot only does it

have little in common with traditional notions of docum entary's "direct cinema," it also strays

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 dramatically from w h at w e might term classic realist filmmaking. As discussed by Robert Ray in

A C ertain T endency in the H ollywood C inem a, H ollyw ood's traditional form al practice —what

he calls the "invisible style" —conceals the techniques of film m aking behind a very conventional

set of ru les in order to subordinate style to narrative concerns (32-55). In contrast, instead of

h id in g the w o rk of the cam era or w orking towards an invisibility of the m edium through

com prehensibility of space and action, w h at Spielberg an d his cinem atographer Janusz Kam insky

create has been called by one critic "a lesson for the film textbooks, to be as endlessly rew ound,

frozen a n d analyzed as the show er scene in Psycho" (D oherty 70).

By experim enting with focus, exposure and lenses, Spielberg and Kaminsky did their

best to simulate the look of preexisting images of D-Day by using techniques unavailable to the

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producers of those images. In an attempt to reproduce the characteristic blur of Robert Capa's

famous D-Day photographs, editor Michael Kahn used a com mon music video technique of
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double printing each frame of film shot at half speed (12 frames p er second) so that when

projected at normal speed, action appears normal except that "everything m oves in a strobed-out
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manner" (Daly 22). Likewise, camera m ovem ent and framing were designed to produce footage

similar to that of actual combat cameramen in John Ford's D-Day docum entary. The framing of

the action is extremely tight and, because w e are denied the traditional establishing shot
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breakdown progression, our placement within the space is extremely confusing. Indeed, it takes a

full thirty minutes before w e see a shot that establishes the landscape of the action. Though w e

occasionally share what w e assume to be the point of view of Captain Miller (Tom H anks), w e

are also positioned on the bottom of the channel (with a fisheye view?), among the w ounded and

dead on the beach, and, occasionally even with the German soldiers in the bunkers on the cliffs

above. Clearly, the intention of the O m aha Beach sequence is not to sim ulate the perspective of

combat cinematographers —despite the filmmakers' claims to authenticity, but to exert a

maximum impact on m ovie spectators through an act of bravura filmmaking. Rather than create

a frame through which w e come to view the rest of the story, tire style of this sequence works

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 against n arrative coherence, begging us to ask, no t "w hat's going on here?", but "how did

Spielberg do that?" As R aphael Shargel noted in his review, "...the jittery camera movement and

awkward film speed, not to mention the inconsistency of the light from shot to shot and the

splashes of water and blood that occasionally fly into the lens, remind us that after all w e are only

watching a movie" (21).

In the case of Saving Private Ryan, then, w e are faced with a conundrum: the more

stylized the images, the more realistic they are assumed to be. As is often the case, what counts

for realism in Saving Private Ryan is dependent on the film's depiction of violence.1 With the aid of

technology, Spielberg creates a violence that is som ehow realer than the real. Only a few

reviewers com m ented on the excessive stylization of the Omaha Beach landing. In his review for

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Film.com, Peter Brunette writes: "The horror, confusion, and bloody viscera of the Normandy D-

Day landings are captured in stunning fashion, even if —as w e realize only later —this extended
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sequence has little to do with the story itself, and seems to have been included primarily for its

thrills." And just as the sequence has little to do with the narrative that follow s, it also has little to
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do with the style of the rest of the film, which, all things considered, is pretty standard stuff. The

brief occasions when landing sequence techniques are reprised serve more as a signal of violence

to come, almost warning us to sink lower in our seats and cover our eyes. As Doherty notes, "The
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guilty secret here is that far from being horrifying and repulsive, the stunning spectacles of sight

and sound is a joy to behold and harken to from a theater seat, pure cinema at its most hypnotic

and intense. Godard is right: war on screen is always exhilarating"(70). Though w e might not

want to think of the violence o f this sequence as "fun", it is certainly thrilling in the w ay that scary

things often are. Gerald Kaufmann and Isabel Hilton go so far as to claim that "it is the scariest

ride in the fairground, but it is a fairground ride, nonetheless"(40). This m ight explain why

Spielberg himself found the sequence so compelling. According to editor Michael Kahn,

Spielberg "couldn't get enough" of his ow n im ages;"... virtually everyday, Steven came in asking

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 to see one p a r t [of the Omaha Beach landing sequence] and would end up watching the whole

thing again" (Daly 22).

In m any ways, the story of how The M atrix was m ade and received offers a nice

counterpoint. Instead of a star director like Spielberg, The Matrix ivas the idea of two Marvel

comic writers and college dropouts, brothers Larry and Andy VVachowski, whose only directorial

credit up to that point had been the small budget, lesbian neo-noir thriller, Bound. In contrast to

Saving Private Ryan, The M atrix was difficult to describe —narratively convoluted and thematically

dense. In order to sell the project to Warner Brothers, the Wachowskis' hired comic artists Steve

Skroce and Geof Darrow to produce a four-hundred-page comic book version of the film, later

used as storyboards during the filming. Instead of three-time Oscar winner, Tom Hanks, it had

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Keanu Reeves as its star, a known actor, but not him self a reliable box office draw.2 The film was

shot in Australia, not to provide a sense of realism in location, but because it w ould be cheaper to
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shoot there. Rather than Dye's ten-day boot camp, the actors were asked to take part in a grueling

four months of martial arts and wire training with Yuen Wo Ping so that they could perform their
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ow n stunts. Rather than using known techniques, the film was going to demand a great deal of

computer generated special effects development, and indeed, the one area in which expenses

weren't spared was in the technical developm ent of "flo-mo" or "bullet-time," a complicated
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elaboration on freezed object/m oving camera technique best known from television advertising.

Whereas critics and the public seemed to agree about the importance of Saving Private

Ryan, matching the exceptional reviews with exceptional attendance, the reception of The Matrix

was split between the m ovie "professionals" and audiences. The reviews were at best ambivalent,

and at worst, downright insulting. Bob Graham wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, "It's

astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in

the service of som ething so stupid" (C-14). The public, on the other hand, w ent for the film

unabashedly, first in the theaters where The Matrix scored the largest April opening ever, raking

in $37.4 million in its opening week, and then at home, with fans buying 1.5 million DVDs in the

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 w eek after its release . Ultim ately, this $60 m illion film earned $459 million w orldw ide. The

biggest pro b lem for reviewers was th at The Matrix itself is so consum ed by its style. As Sean

Axmaker wrote for the Seattle Weekly, “Clearly the Wachowskis are more interested in their

cinematic toys than their story." Likewise, A ndrew O ’Hehir commented in his review for

Salon.com "The W achowskis have little feeling for character or human interaction, b u t their

passion for m ovies —for making them, watching them, inhabiting their world —is pure and

deep." In traditional critical language, such an attention to style over substance m akes The Matrix

suspect, a film which Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment W eekly claimed w as "underwritten

and overdirected" and "soulless" (46). Similarly, David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor

condem ned the film based on his assessment of its plotlessness: “The Matrix zoom s along so

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quickly that there's no time to ponder the plot. This is fortunate, since the plot is anything but

logical and doesn't build emotional credibility with it skin-deep characters and by-the-numbers
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dialog" (15). Even reviewers who liked the film felt the need to qualify their praise of the

stylistics by admitting that the narrative and character developm ent is lacking. O'Hehir opened
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his review with the admission that "part of m e wants to dismiss The M atrix as a loud and empty

spectacle, 1999's apex of dazzling technological style over substance."

This alleged em ptiness didn't seem to disturb the film's public. A great number of
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younger viewers, especially the Internet generation, found the film to be such an apt chronicle of

their experience, that they made the World W ide Web a forum for their testimonials. Shortly after

its release, chats and newsgroups were flooded with M atrix threads (Rothstein), and even four

years later, the whatisthematrix.com chat is still going strong. Whereas Saving Private Ryan

supposedly brought the generations together, The M atrix illustrated just how different their

experiences of them selves and the w orld really are. W hile the "youngsters” were rhapsodizing

on the Internet, Stephen Hunter of the W ashington Post noted, "my ancient brain is too sluggy

with concepts like 'logic' and 'cause-effect' and 'probability' to follow the mechanics of it."

O'Hehir admitted, "all this pseudo-spiritual hokum , along with the overamped onslaught of

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 special effects —som e of them quite am azing —will hold 14-year-old boys in rapture, not to

mention those of us of all ages and genders w ho still harbor a 14-year-old boy som ew here

inside." W hile The Matrix fascinated the kids, their parents d id n 't alw ays u n d erstan d it Film

review ers versed in a critical tradition that privileges narrative structure over stylistic exuberance

found them selves torn, not so sure they should like the film. And though reviewers were either

bored or fascinated by its fight scenes, there was little discussion of whether this film might be

too violent. Indeed it was only after the Columbine killings that the film 's violence became

questionable.

In the days after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered twelve of their schoolmates

and a teacher in Littleton, Colorado, The Matrix drew fire and joined other usual media suspects,

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such as Natural Born Killers and the videogam e Doom, as examples of a violence-saturated

culture.3 Perhaps it was a coincidence of costume: the black dusters and wrap-around sunglasses
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that Harris and Klebold sported as their "trademark" were eerily similar to the overcoat and

shades worn by Keanu Reeve's character N eo on The Matrix poster. (It was also a similarity in
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clothing style that re-indicted The Basketball Diaries, already one of the films to blame since the

school shootings a year earlier in Paducah, Kentucky.) It was precisely the stylish-ness of the film

that made its violence, unlike that of the more realistic and "serious" Saving Private Ryan, seem so
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much more dangerous, even if it could not be said to be that much more stylized. The chief

difference, and the aspect that makes The M atrix such an easy target for critics concerned about

the influence of violent media on the young, is that the narrative of the film serves as an excuse

for the violence, and the violence is an excuse to play wonderful tricks with the m edium .4

Ultimately, the difference between w hat I will be calling an aestheticized violence and a

violence that is merely excessive lies in this nebulous realm of cinematic style, and style is, as

many film critics have noted, notoriously difficult to talk about. In its m ost minimal terms, style

is, as David Bordwell puts it, "a film 's system atic and significant use of techniques of the

medium" (Film Style 4). All films em ploy som e sort of style, though in som e cases, as in that of

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 H ollyw ood cinem a's classical m ode, w e are so familiar w ith the techniques th at w e barely notice

them . G enerally, w hen we speak of a film's style, w e m ean those technical elem ents th at rem ain

relatively consistent throughout, giving the film a "texture" (Bordwell 4). O pposed to the

co n tinuity of style is the discontinuity of "excess." Kristin T hom pson suggests that "excess does

not equal style, but the two are closely linked" because both are based in tire "materiality" of film

(132). Excess appears in those elements of a film "not contained by its unifying forces"(130), which

in Thompson's terms are primarily those of narrative. Extrapolating from this notion, then, w e

might think of an excessive violence as being one w here either the narrative or stylistic continuity

is disrupted in one w ay or another, as, for example, in the scene in Pulp Fiction where Lance (Eric

Stoltz) plunges the hypodermic needle in Mia's (Uma Thurman's) chest. Though this moment of

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violence is motivated by the narrative (w e expect a certain amount of violence in a story about hit

men, mob bosses, boxers and robbers), the duration and attention it receives makes it excessive.
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While it does function counter to narrative, it does not present a sustained stylistic discontinuity.

Likewise, the Omaha Beach landing and, to a lesser extent, the final battle in Saving Private Ryan
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serve as disruptions in the narrative and even seem to have little to do with the rest of the film. In

m any w ays, these moments of aestheticized violence seem disconnected from the story they

might be said to frame. The lessons the film has to teach, the one that seem ed so important to
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history teachers who took their classes to special screenings, and to the judge in Minnesota, were

lessons which grew out of story, out of a very traditional narrative of the camaraderie of men of

arms. The rational pleasures afforded by the film are so satisfying that even such splendid

moments of excess can't derail the narrative drive. A fter the dizzying beginning I expected a film

that w ould present an equally dizzying perspective on war; however, what the rest of the film

provided was just another, rather jingoistic view of World War II based in the same old us (or

U.S.) versus the Nazis rhetoric represented in the classical (invisible) style. I w ould argue that it

was the sense of familiarity w e had with the story rather than the film's realism that made it so

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 p o p u lar and seem so culturally im p o rta n t Ultim ately, though it gave us tw enty m inutes of

thrills, neither the style nor the content of Saving Private Ryan w as very disconcerting.

Aestheticized violence, in contrast, is almost entirely d ep e n d en t on sty listic discontinuity7.

W hereas an excessive violence may reveal the arbitrary nature of film m aking, aestheticized

violence, dep en d in g on its differing degrees, breaks narrative fram es, and indeed ruptures our

participation in traditional m odes of cinematic storytelling. Sometim es referred to as "comedic

violence" or "h ap p y violence" (as by G eorge G erbner in The Killing Screens), aestheticized

violence is typical of the kinds of film s criticized by M ark C rispin Miller as being "cartoonlike', in

which the visceral enjoym ent of spectacles and stars usu rp the m ore intellectual, critical pleasures

of narrative a n d character developm ent (212). It is ju st such a tendency th at Richard Schickel

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bemoans when he blames television for having "reduced the audiences' expectations of coherence

in the developm ent of a plot, as w ell as its capacity to deal with the more subtle layerings of a
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more sophisticated kind of storytelling" ("Crisis" 6). In his discussion of the Three Stooges films,

Brunette tries to come to terms with what he calls the tw o narratives he finds within them. On the
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one hand, he notes a plot (though in many cases a very thin one); on the other, he sees a "mini­

narrative" of violence, based in "the ever-increasing stakes of oneupmanship" (175). Though the

Stooges films d o not aestheticize their violence in the w ay I am talking about, the connection
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between the violence and the plot that supposedly frames it is relevant to my discussion. N ot

only do they often share a tendency towards the comedic, the eye-gouging slapstick violence of

the Stooges, the highly stylized violence of the recent films I am discussing do "a certain violence

to the structures that attempt to contain [them] and within which w e try to think [them]" (176).

We might say in the case of The Matrix, that it is a m ovie turned on its head in the traditional

sense —the narrative grows out of the style rather than vice versa. This does not necessarily mean,

however, that the film has no narrative (it w ould be as ridiculous to say that a film that privileges

narrative has no style). Instead, the exploration past the technical limits of the medium itself tells

a story of coming to terms with technology —the use of multiple cameras film ing at different

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 speeds, the developm ent of "virtual cinem atography," the com bination of still and movie

cameras to allow motion to be frozen or dram atically slow ed in tim e even as the spatial

relationships change, a n d the com puter m anipulation of images w hich allows for norm al speed

action in the midst of a frozen setting—create an style through which characters also learn to

overcom e their "physical" limitations. In short, the style afforded by visual technologies allow s

the characters to take control of their technological representations in order to threaten the

dominance of the machines. Indeed, this is the irony of The Matrix. Whereas Saving Private Ryan

stylized its violent mom ents to create a sense of realism, The M atrix uses its violent style to attack

the "realism" of the computer-made fantasy designed to keep the "copper top" human batteries

blissfully ignorant of the post-apocalyptic world. Interestingly enough, the most manipulated

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moments, the ones that are almost entirely computer generated, are those representing the real

world after the machines have taken over. The world of the matrix, on the other hand, is
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primarily represented through filmed live-action (though these sections are also highly digitally

enhanced). In a very literal sense, then, the film uses "style as a form of refusal" (Genet qtd. in
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Hebdige 4), in that through the stylization of the violence that the machines (computers) allow,

the characters to master and then overcome the machine-m ade version of the world.

Although both films portray their violent moments in a highly stylized manner, The
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M atrix emerges as an exam ple of an aestheticization of violence w hile Saving Private Ryan drifts

into the realm of a violence that is "merely" graphic. Several characteristics of an aestheticized

violence emerge in the gap between these two films. The first is the privileging of style over

narrative. Narrative becom es merely a framework to hold the style; excess, then, becom es the

rule. N arrative drive is derailed or of only secondary importance. As Brunette indicated, the

violence forms its ow n little narrative of one-upmanship as its stylization reaches for increasingly

h ig h er degrees of excessiveness. A s a result, these film s seem provisional, open to revision. They

are often sequels films or highly generic. The M atrix, for example, w as always intended as a part

of a trilogy, whereas a sequel of Saving Private Ryan is unthinkable. Though as Doherty noted, the

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 representation of violence in film has typically been a m easure of realism, films like The Matrix

em ploy violence to make style visible, working counter to realism , showing, in fact, how well and

beautifully the camera can "lie." This means that these films are often comic or do not take

them selves very seriously, and it is this mixture of tones that has made critics fear the

implications for youthful viewers. These are films that critic Yvonne Tasker ironically labels

"Dumb M ovies for Dum b People" (Spectacular Bodies 5-6) —they have less interest in plumbing

the depths of profundity, they invest less in moral or ethical discussions of violence in a violent

society, than they revel in a logic of "astonishment" noted by Tom Gunning in his term "cinema of

attractions." These are films interested in surfaces, in "display rather than the temporal unfolding

essential to narrative" (Gunning 10). It is exactly this aspect of The Matrix, rather than trenchcoats

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and wrap-around sunglasses that m ade the critics and politicians go hunting for it after

Columbine. As James Bowman wrote in The American Spectator shortly afterwards: "Even if w e
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are not turning our children into Harrises and Klebolds w ith o u t knowing it, w e are certainly

doing them no favors by letting them spend their formative years (as they used to be called)
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steeped in an alm ost constant flow of 'entertainment' which does not consider the distinction

between reality and fantasy, or truth an d falsehood, to be of any great moment" (64).
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D efin in g V iolence(s)

During his unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1996, Bob Dole became a film critic.

Following a trend in the polls indicating that people were concerned about violence in the

movies, he made a list of films he thought were "family friendly" versus those he deem ed to be

"nightmares of depravity" (Schickel "No" 29). Revealingly enough, True Lies, the 1994 vehicle for

conservative actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, met Dole's criteria for family fare, although it

contains a comic subplot of spousal abuse and features an abundance of violence. On the other

hand, liberal director Oliver Stone's 1995 release, Natural Born Killers, became the poster child for

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 m edia "depravity" even though its attack of m edia sensationalism is actually very close to Dole's

ow n position.5 This kind of confusion is all too common in the discourse surrounding media

violence. In d eed , one of the m ajor roadblocks standing in the w ay of any regulation of m edia

violence is the problem of determining exactly which films should be censored. Ask ten people

and they w ill m ost likely agree that H ollyw ood films are too violent. Ask them w hich films they

m ean, a n d though they m ight list the old stand-bys, such as Rnmbo, The Terminator, Natural Born

Killers (none of which they are likely to have seen), they will probably have difficulty specifying

others.6 As a result of this inability to precisely locate the offending parties, a number of critics,

most notably Martin Barker ("Newson" 27-28) and John Leonard (2), have questioned whether

there is even such a thing as media violence.

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This problem of definition is bound up with the difficulty w e have in defining violence

more generally. Though w e typically tend to think in the terms provided by the primary
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definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, of violence as an "exercise of physical force so as to

cause injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property," our notions of what constitutes injury
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are by no means constant. Indeed, w e have recently come to locate violence in places where it

was not recognized twenty or thirty years ago. For example, marital rape was not considered a

possibility —much less an act of violence—until about 20 years ago, when feminists activists
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created awareness that marital sex is not, by definition, always consensual. Just as the OED

definition goes on to consider violence in more metaphorical terms, such as "a violence to

meaning or language," w e have also begun to ask whether the force of violence m ust be physical.

During the 1980s and 90s, university and college cam pus across the country began to recognize

certain kinds of speech as acts of violence against others. The so-called "hate speech" policies

w ere designed to rid cam puses of language directed against minority groups and w om en that

creates a hostile learning environment. The belief that words can w ound is certainly not new, b u t

this kind of institutionalized recognition of the violence of language certainly is. We have also

come to question whether violence must be active. Johan Galtung's notion of "structural violence"

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